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| A rare instance when the movie delivers what its poster promises. |
It’s Christmas Eve, 1986, and Santiago teenager Borja (a very effective Cristóbal Rodríguez Costabal) is whiling away his time reading Stephen King, pestering his older brother Vincente (Cristóbal’s real-life brother Santiago Rodríguez Costabal) and irritating his embittered mother (Carmina Riego). “Pay respect to the occasion,” he tells her during dinner. “God was born today.” “And he was killed 33 years later,” his mother sniffs.
After Mama puts herself to bed with pills and booze, the brothers embark on separate sexual journeys. Vincente goes cruising in a city park, while Borja breaks into his brother’s locked room and riffles through his things, discovering Vincente’s poorly hidden collection of gay skin magazines. It’s all sexy fun until a sexual assault/bashing sends Vincente running home, only to discover his privacy violated and that he and his brother have a shared secret, a secret that Borja shows little interest keeping. “We’re alike,” Borja taunts. “We’re brothers. And we like cock.” Then Mama comes to and overhears her sons, at which point the movie suddenly becomes a thriller.
Cola de Mono, its title referencing both an eggnog-like drink and a gay slur in Chile, gets a lot of attention for featuring copious amounts of male nudity and explicit sex (including a brief unsimulated blowjob), but for me its appeal is largely nostalgic. The 1980s pop culture references, from Borja liking books by King and Robin Cook to the boys decorating their rooms with movie posters for Desperately Seeking Susan and the more obscure Willie & Phil, were a treat, as was Fuguet’s resurrecting adolescent memories of hoarding gay porn mags and ogling guys wearing tight polyester gym shorts, with the added bonus that this time I could do so openly if not guilt-free. (I’m sure Cristóbal Rodríguez Costabal is of age, but I felt a little pervy admiring the ass of what is supposed to be a 15- or 16-year-old, though clearly the movie’s marketing team weren’t as conflicted).
As much as I enjoyed Cola de Mono for artistic and prurient reasons, the movie veers off course in its final third when it jumps to 1999, following an adult Borja (now played by Santiago Rodríguez Costabal, sporting a full beard) in what’s essentially an extended epilogue. This part of the movie, which includes a long sequence set inside a gay bathhouse, is titillating, but it serves little purpose beyond adding some bonus sex and nudity. Fuguet hurts his movie further by giving it a shocking ending, then muddying the waters by suggesting it was a film within a film. As much as I appreciated the extra skin, Fuguet would’ve done better to confine Cola de Mono's narrative to 1986.
